The New Media's revolutionary opportunities

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators News Service.. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his latest, "The Tea Party Manifesto," and his classic, "Taking America Back," now in its third edition and 14th printing. Farah is the former editor of the legendary Sacramento Union and other major-market dailies.

I got hooked on daily newspapering like a lot of folks in my
generation because of Watergate.

In Watergate, we saw two lowly reporters for the Washington Post
bring down a president. And it looked like fun.

I remember dropping out of college for a semester so I could watch
the Watergate hearings from beginning to end every day without
interruption.

Was that a bad motivation for choosing a journalism career? No. On
the contrary, it is the highest motivation.

Because, as I like to say over and over again, the central role of a
free press in a free society is to serve as a watchdog on government.

The founding fathers understood this concept. Thomas Jefferson,
perhaps, best of all.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government
without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not
hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” he said. That’s always been my
attitude. It certainly ought to be the attitude of real news people the
world over.

But there’s a danger is having such an attitude today — even in the
media. If you do, many people will confuse what you do with some kind of
political agenda.

The truth is, we’re just doing our jobs — as real journalists. This
is the way news people are supposed to act. We’re supposed to be
skeptical of government — maybe even cynical.

We are supposed to root out government fraud, waste, abuse and
corruption at every turn.

And that’s what we do at WorldNetDaily.com. That’s our philosophy.
That’s our credo. That’s our mission. And those of you familiar with
what we do know that we specialize in exposing government fraud, waste,
abuse and corruption wherever we find it and whomever is responsible for
it.

This simple formula — a basic assumption of the American
journalistic tradition for 200 years — taken to the New Media less than
three years ago has resulted in an unparalleled commercial and popular
success.

Begun in May 1997 by me and my wife Elizabeth as a non-profit
endeavor, with no capital and hardly any human resources,
WorldNetDaily.com is now one of the most heavily trafficked news sites
on the Internet — beating out some corporate giants such as the L.A.
Times, Fox News, Knight Ridder, McClatchy, New York Daily News, New York
Post and even AP in pageviews.

It is also the fastest growing news site on the Internet and one of
the fastest-growing websites of any kind.

For 35 of the last 44 weeks it has been voted the most
popular website in the world, in the Internet Top 100 rankings.

It is consistently among the “stickiest” news sites on the
Internet — even rivaling ESPN and MSNBC, according to PCDataOnline.

We have about 200,000 “unique” individuals who read
WorldNetDaily, ranking us ninth among all non-newspaper news sites in
the world in any language. If you take out the state-subsidized sites
such as the BBC and NPR, we are sixth.

This unprecedented success on the Internet has allowed us to
launch a new monthly magazine, a new book publishing division and we are
preparing to launch a new radio news division later this year, having
lured original CNN anchor David Goodnow to serve as managing editor. We
also recently hired Paul Sperry, Washington bureau chief of Investor’s
Business Daily and the guy made famous for his Rose Garden confrontation
with Bill Clinton last fall.

In short, we are building a top-flight news organization around the
most basic and simple philosophy of American journalism — that our
primary job is to watchdog government.

How is that possible?

It’s only possible because the old media — the corporate-statist
dominated government-media complex — has lost its way.

These folks literally do not even remember why they are in the news
business. They have no sense of mission. And it shows all over their
work.

But I’m here to tell you that one of the main reasons the federal
government has been getting bigger and bigger is because of the
propaganda dished out by the old media.

Think about it. When you read the front page of the New York Times or
listen to Tom Brokaw or one of the other celebrity talking heads, think
about how they present the news. Usually the formula is something like
this: They present a problem — real or imagined. They hype it into a
crisis. And then they offer an implied solution — almost always a
government solution — higher taxes, more regulation, more
freedom-restricting legislation.

That’s the formula for news in the old media today. And while it has
been successful at helping the state grab power, it is turning people
off in bigger numbers all the time. People are hungry for real
alternatives because they sense they are being manipulated.

They respond very enthusiastically to the truth.

If you’re one of those people out there who craves freedom,
understand that knowing and understanding the truth is a prerequisite
for the restoration and maintenance of liberty.

How much is riding on the success of the New Media revolution?

Everything.

It’s as important to America’s future as the first revolution was to
our history.